Death may Die

What dies with death?

Paleozoic Era

Cambrian Period

The Old Ones, by this time, have developed and settled into their place as rulers of the Earth, having had a few hundred million years to do so. However, according to the pictorial records at Kadeth, an unknown species descended upon the world.

The war was, apparently, considerably violent, and based on what limited geological evidence is available the Old Ones used every tool at their disposal. This caused a major ecological upheaval, and between the pictorial record and geological data one can presume that the Cambrian explosion was a direct consequence of the tools of war being developed by the Old Ones colliding with whatever their adversaries were.

The result, according to Kadeth, was the abandonment of the surface of the Earth everywhere but in the area of Kadeth, on what would become East Antarctica. In response, the alien aggressors placed a major fortification system (evidently formed from irregular stone towers of extrusive igneous rock) as near as they could to it. In theory, if any of those heavy towers remained, they would be in Australia.

The Old Ones were unassailable in the sea, however, and the adversaries couldn’t gain any traction in the depths. It isn’t clear from the record why they came, and there’s no clear evidence of their actions anywhere on Earth. It’s as if they came here just to be here, which may have been the reason if they had no other world available to them.

Their bizarre appearance in the mythopoeic artwork of the pictorial histories of Kadeth, look much like spirits, with features of diseased mounds of flesh. One scholar noted that they looked like wraith-like representations of Old One corpses, which may have been the image that developed after they stopped encountering them. For this reason, the species gains the reference term “Wraith.”

Carboniferous Period

The situation seems to have continued unchanged for around two hundred million years (though doubtless many changes occurred that simply didn’t register in the record). However, at some point in the Mississippian Epoch, another species appears to have come to Earth. According to the records of Kadeth, they were impossibly titanic with features that look like little on Earth today. Current evidence concludes that these were the first Raliites on Earth.

These titans weren’t any more warmly welcomed by the Old Ones than the Wraiths, but the Wraiths had kept the Old Ones off the land outside of Kadeth. Meanwhile, the Old Ones managed to keep the Raliites out of the Sea. There seemed to be a massive tug-of-war over the oceans, as the different forces collided to adjust sea levels – the Wraiths seemed to prefer lower sea levels, the Old Ones wanted them higher, while the Raliites were amphibious and simply wanted the environment stable.

The Raliites may have used their own organic weapons platforms, but it seems clear that the Old Ones had perfected their biological weapons platforms, including the use of their industrial biocomputers for military purpose. The Raliites fielded smaller Raliite forces. The end of this situation was the establishment of a unique Raliite city that floated on the waters. It isn’t clear where it came from, but SFS hypothesis appears to be that they converted their own space transit platforms into a surface habitat.

This led to the Wraiths being beaten back into a few major strong points, including ones in modern-day Australia which had previously been a position of strength to pressure the Old Ones. The Raliites seemed to command the surface while the Old Ones persisted in their command of the deep.

Then, suddenly, in the Pennsylvanian Epoch, it all changed. The records at Kadeth show the Raliite oceanic city suddenly sinking, its titans no longer visible within it. Rali cults often conjecture that this is when the “stars went wrong.” Current thinking based on geological evidence is much less prosaic. The Mississippian Epoch was the point of highest oxygen density in the Earth’s atmosphere, more than any other time in Earth’s history. In the Pennsylvanian Epoch, that plunged. The titans simply died a slow death of hypoxia.

However, the continual beacon of Rali demonstrates that the former masters of the surface of the Earth didn’t believe their death was eternal, and presumably the city of Rali holds them sequestered in suspended animation, awaiting a rise in the oxygen saturation of the Earth. This should have led to a sudden resurgence of the Wraiths, but while there likely was an outgrowth another event completely suppressed the Wraiths.

The situation actually turns against the Old Ones. Despite putatively losing one of their major adversaries, it’s clear that their oceanic holdings actually recede, and they do not claim many land holdings (which they subsequently lose). Perhaps the Wraiths managed to claim some of their old holdings, but it seems clear that the smaller Raliites were very capable of claiming some amount of oceanic territory from the Old One.

Permian Period

Some of the pictorial record of Kadeth shows a strange, ecdysozoic creature, often around the Wraiths. It seems these creatures were intelligent, although the pictorial record seems to treat them significantly differently. According to some reports from persons once thought to have suffered psychogenic fugue, similar creatures were responsible for the sudden fugue states of a small number of humans throughout history. According to these reports, these creatures called themselves the Great Race.

During the Permian Era, they went from primitive creature to incredible intelligence, using weapons of phenomenal functionality and seemingly always having the upper hand on their foes. The pictorial record, along with the record of the testimony of some of the fugue state sufferers, states that they were equally phenomenally able against the Old Ones. According to their story, the Great Race were a people that had learned to send their minds through time to exchange consciousness with other creatures in other places and times.

The credibility of the otherwise absurd “mind swap” claim is upheld by the fact that it appears they actually succeeded at it. The fugue state sufferers reported remembering in dreams some of their experiences with the Great Race, and their descriptions match with precision the descriptions shown in the pictorial record on Kadeth, which was only discovered in the last fifty years.

The Great Race took great pains to eradicate the Wraiths, but failed to complete that task. According to the fugue sufferers (and peripherally confirmed by a couple of the images in Kadeth), they imprisoned the remainder within their towers and sealed them, both on the surface and underground. The Great Race, at least in body, were native to this Earth, and it seems the Old Ones were better endeared to them. (It appears the Great Race were not excessions, which likely also helped.)

Thus, the Great Race took most of the surface realm of the Wraiths, and much of the surface apparently remained derelict, though both Old Ones and Great Race would explore and gather resources. There’s some peripheral evidence of wars, but across millions of years one would expect a few bad moments.